"Egg & Spoon" by Gregory Maguire

8/11/2019 "Egg & Spoon" by Gregory Maguire

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Before.

HE HEELS OF MILIARY BOOS, SRIKING MARBLE FLOORS,

made a sound like thrown stones. Te old man knew that agents

were hunting for him. He capped the inkwell and shook his pen. In

his haste, he splattered the pale French wallpaper around his desk.

Tat will look like spots of dried blood, he thought, my blood.He wrapped sheets of paper around his forearms, then pulled

down the sleeves of his monks robe. He threw on his greatcoat

against the cold. He put his steel-nibbed pen in his breast pocket.

Were he lucky enough to survive, he might leave record of how he

had come to this.

xxx


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Tis is where I am inclined to start, with my own abduction. You

will think me overly interested in myself. Or worse, melodramatic.

I cant help that. Ifyoureever dragged from your chambers at mid-night, blindfolded and gagged, without being told whether youre

off to a firing squad or a surprise birthday party, youll find that

you turn and return to that pivotal moment. If you survive the

surprise.

Sooner or later you realize that everything you experience,

especially something like being arrested, is never only about you.

Your life story is really about how the hands of history caught youup, played with you, and you with them. History plays for keeps;

individuals play for time.

When soldiers broke down the door to my palace apartments,

I thought I was headed for a rendezvous with death. Te men

were rough, the way young men frightened of their own strength

can be. Teir mutters, their coded syllables, I couldnt understand

them.

I was rushed down a back staircase, I was hustled toward a car-

riage. Before they knotted a blindfold about my bleeding head, I

saw ravens fighting over the corpse of a rat. Ravens arent usually

nocturnal, but hunger can be.

I wasnt shot. Instead, I was locked in a tower on the outskirts

of the empire.At first I scraped the wall with a sharp stone to mark the days.

I bunched the scratches in sevens. Ten I fell sick, and lost count

while in a fever, and when I recovered, I was too discouraged to

begin again.

But this story is not about me.

xxx


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I should explain about living in custody.

From the start, food and medicine came up to me daily, in a

bucket tied to a hoist. Right away, I began to send letters by returnbucket. One letter a day, for several years. Begging the sar to for-

give me my part in the plot, to release me. Explaining to him, as

I do to you now, how it all came to pass. It was a gamble. sars

resent insubordination. I was imprisoned for helping a prisoner

escape from prison. Ironic, isnt it.

I didnt know if, at the bottom of the rope, my letters were

laughed at and thrown away. Or if my entreaties were sent to thecourt of the sar. Now and then, however, more writing supplies

arrived.

I was afraid that one day the sar might become tired of hear-

ing from me and order me killed. I tried to keep my letters vivid

so he would wait for each one daily. Te Scheherazade strategy.

Tough I may only have been entertaining my anonymous sentries

below.

In those years I didnt see a human soul, except through the gaze of

my memory or my imagination.

I had a single narrow window. I could identify anything

viewed from a distance: the celestial parade, the windswept bar-

rens. Nothing near.With my good eye, I saw birds and landscape, landscape and

birds. Te birds came close at first larks, curious wrens, stu-

pid pigeons, as I thought then. Tey soon learned that I wouldnt

spread crumbs for them on my window ledge. I didnt have enough

to spare. Tey stopped visiting.

At first I watched the birds against the sky, their shadows


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against the ground. Ten I followed birds in my mind. I thought

of it as peering with my blind eye: seeing what the birds could

see, or had seen in the past, about what had happened tobring me to this prison tower. I put together what I knew for

certain with what my visions now told me. I wrote what I saw to

the sar.

ake, for instance, those birds. Everywhere, birds. Have you

stopped to think that on a sunny day, almost every bird casts a

shadow?Its true. When an eagle floats over the icy peaks, his shadow

slides upslope and down, a blue cloth. Te hawk and the

hummingbird: big shadow and small. Even the duck in a millpond

drags her ducky umbrage in the mud.

Te sparrow in cities, on a spree with her thousand cousins.

Have you noticed? As sparrows wheel over the basilica, they scat-

ter shadows like handprints on the spiral wooden ribs and ribbons

of those turnip domes. Sparrows even come between the sun and

the high windows of the Winter Palace of the sar. How dare they,

the sar said once. He had a headache.

I know this because he told me so. I once had the ear of

the sar.

Anyway.

Yes, all birds cast shadows on bright days. Except for one. Te

Firebird, bright soul of all the Russias, casts no shadow.

You cant be surprised at that. What, aer all, could the shadow

of light be? No such thing. It is a trick, a paradox. It hurts to think

about it.


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However, they say any mortal boy or girl who can snatch a tail

feather of this bird . . . well, that child can make a wish that will

come true. Why a child and not, say, a robber-baron industrialistor a society dame? Or even some goofy naturalist collecting speci-

mens in the badlands? I dont know. Te stories are always about

children.

Now, in his line of work, a monk meets few children. If any of

them ever made wishes that came true, they didnt tell me about

it. Why should they? I might not have believed them anyway. Not

back then.I didnt understand the business about Firebirds and children

and wishes. I guessed the sar didnt either. So in this chamber

haunted only by myself, I let my mind unspool. I suppose you

might think I was going mad. Tink what you like. In my ravel-

ing thoughts I flew away, as if my spirit were nestled in the breast

feathers of some passing hornbill or waxwing.

I flew to observe children, their dark secrets, so I might better

understand the origin of my own darkness. I also flew to under-

stand my young accomplices in crime, to put myself in their shoes.

In one case, felted peasant boots laced with rawhide cord. In the

other, fine French slippers suitable to wear to a ball.

I flew to have something to write to the sar, to extend the

number of my own days in light.Tose pages are now lost, along with so much else. Here is

my effort to re-create them, before the darkness finishes its claim

upon me.


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PARTdONE

UNTIMELY

THUNDER


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The World in Curtains

The girl has never gone into a theater. But the doctor once

told her what it was like, so the girl thinks she knows.

She thinks a theater is like this room in their home.

Tis one room. Tere was another room once, a kind of shed,

and that was for goats. But the last remaining goat was hungry and

ate the rope that tied the door shut, and got out. Ten something

ate the goat. When the shed fell down because it was mostly sticks

to start with, the family burned it for heat. So now they live in aone-room house. Simple, but it has a stage at the far end. So it is a

theater.

Yes, it is, the girl insists to her two brothers. Te nook could

be a stage. Why not? Everybody thinks its only a bed built into

the wall, with curtains you can draw together to keep the warmth

in. But you can make a world of the bedclothes. When the curtain


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opens, a stone can be a pig, a feather can stand for a whole bird. A

crumb: a feast. Whatever you can think of there it can be.

Sit down, the show is about to start, says Elena. Luka andAlexei, the brothers, are older, and practice skepticism. Shhh.

Te performance cant start if the people arent paying attention.

Maybe a magpie is perched on a windowsill, looking in. rust

me. Its possible.

Tis is the best show I ever saw, says Luka, the firstborn. He

has attended no shows but hers. Look at those bed curtains. Id

pay good money to see these bed curtains four times a week. Lookat those moth holes. Such drama. He makes a retching noise.

I hope theres a dragon, says Alexei. Hes the middle child,

and more prone to tenderness.

Luka agrees. A dragon diving at coaches on the high road to

Warsaw. errifying the horses. He especially likes to eat fat rich

old countesses. First he burns their double chins off with his

breath, one at a time . . .

If you dont quiet down, there will be no show, says Elena. So

her brothers settle. She pulls the curtains back to show them the

world she has made.

Usually its a world of brown hills, a blanket mounded around

pillows. An edge of the sheet shows from underneath, and that can

be the shore of the sea. Te blue stripes on the mattress ticking,waves coming in.

Now and then Elena makes some old familiar folktale hap-

pen here. More oen, Mamas magic nesting doll stands in a valley.

Nearly round on the bottom, like a pear, and soly narrower on

top. Te shape of a slow teardrop: thats a mother for you.


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Te trick about this doll, the magic part? She opens in halves,

and inside her is another mama doll just like the first, except

smaller. Inside that one is a third, and if you keep opening mamas,you find a fourth and a fih and a sixth. Te seventh doll is a

painted baby. It keeps its own counsel and doesnt open.

Sometimes the play is about six mamas searching for their lost

baby in the mountains. Tey take turns climbing the hills and roll-

ing down the slopes, calling, Baby, baby, until one of them finds

the infant in a cave of wrinkling blanket. Te wooden chinking

sound as they collide is chiding, kissing, scolding. It means thefamily can be put back together again.

Putting families back together again. Perhaps an impossible

exercise. We shall see.

When the play is over, the boys clap nicely enough. Alexei

admits, Id rather there were a dragon.

Heres your dragon, says Luka. Hes found an old sock that

belonged to their father, back when he was alive and needed

socks. Trough the holes in the toe, Luka sticks his two fingers.

Te dragon flies above the world, snapping its two-fingered mouth

and crying in a spooky Luka voice. It dives to snip at Alexeis nose.

Hard.Alexei yelps and swears.

Shows over, declares Elena, upstaged, and flicks the curtains

closed. Annoyed. She doesnt like the story to get away from her.Luka stomps off to check his traps and snares. Alexei changes his

clothes; he has a job as a houseboy.

Tats what it used to be like. Once upon a time. oday, how-

ever, the boys arent in the little hut. Elena has just come in from

the village well. Te room has a stillness that seems potent, if


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tentative. Te winter light on the bare floorboards is splotchy from

the grime on the windows. It looks like residue, something having

been washed away. Well. Much hasbeen washed away.Te motherly nesting doll, called the matryoshka, watches

from the shelf with the holy ikon and the cold unlit candles.

Elena sets down the pail of water. She draws near to the cur-

tained side of the room. She pauses and she says a prayer, and then

she opens the two sides of the drapes as quietly as she can.

Here is the world she sees. It looks a lot like the world she plays.

A rolling landscape of upland meadows, sudden woolen cliffs. Teworld steams, and it smells of camphor medicine. It groans and

turns in its bed.

How are you feeling today, Mama? whispers Elena.

Te world does not answer.

Would you like the matryoshka to hold? asks the girl.

Te world does not answer.

Documents

"Egg & Spoon" by Gregory Maguire